the daily dose

my jocoseness got me into a bit of communication trouble last saturday at a funeral, and it seems that my emotive fiction gets me into other kinds of trouble. last night after a dear colleague left my place following a much promised indian dinner prepared by me, i got a phone call from another friend across town. i knew that i was in trouble when i asked him what effect my fiction prose had had on him and he replies that that is something that he would like to talk about in person, not on the phone.

you should have seen my thoughts running wild. gee whiz, it is that bad, really. then he clarified his reaction and then a whole lot of nonsense made sense to me, and i realized that indeed i may have taken one hell of a big bite. now the question, can i chew on it without choking.

so, i had a lousy day yesterday. lousy is perhaps a much too relative and meaningless qualification. lousy is because i did not do one of my regular activities only because i felt physically exhausted and totally out of it. lousy because in my indian cooking there was something that tasted off to me, although my colleague ate with ferocious appetite, i was not impressed by my own cooking yesterday. in our after dinner conversation it occurred to me that i had forgotten to add a few spices at the end of the cooking process. no wonder, it did not taste right. however not all was a disaster yesterday, lots of good stuff happened.

i had an excellent session with my analyst, great dinner conversation with another physicist, and my friend from across town did provide the iota of much needed sanity to the day, even if at first it all sounded much too catastrophic.

the truth is one hell of whore, ain't it?

Technorati Tags: insanity, the daily dose, truth

how on earth are you today?

today it really sucks. it is raining or snowing outside, even the weather can not decide, and the thermometer has dropped to a nice balmy 4 C. somedays i have no other recourse than to throw in the towel, it is one of those days.

this here blog is about the many attempts of answering the routine question "how are you?" and a place to dump my feelings, vulnerabilities and half-baked thoughts. some love what i write, some hate what i write. clearly the stuff is polarizing. i particularly do not care one way or the other. if you do like what i write that is fine, and if you do not that is also fine, but remember that there is nothing compulsory about reading what i write. i write for myself and those few of my friends who do care to read it on occasions. now given that recent scientific evidence has it that the written word has a rather random chance of being understood or not, it is perhaps not too surprising that this polarization takes place.

to add insult to injury, one of my many fascinations with writing and linguistics is exactly because of the severe limitations imposed on written expression. i know of people who write with a most dismal use of both syntax and grammar, and somehow they do manage to communicate. just one week ago after training my sensei and i were discussing this very issue, although we are not self or otherwise proclaimed communication experts, we have come to realize that communication is not what is said or written, it is what gets understood. this very state of affairs does make the whole enterprise of writing, speaking, or communicating very tricky indeed. sometimes the shit hits the fan, and sometimes i totally loose it. trolls are one thing, but internet stalking is a bit too much for me. stalking is a crime, while trolling is just silliness in high doses.

i get stalked, and it is not a comforting feeling. i made a mistake last night and went in for a IM dialogue with my stalker because i thought that he was just  a troll, but i was not sure. trolls i can deal with. no, this person is a stalker, he knows my identity, he knows where i live. for once i am really happy that yahoo does cooperate with law enforcing entities, although i do wish it was not to stifle  freedom of speech.

Technorati Tags: communications, freedom, freedom of speech, internet, stalking, troll

strange things do happen

when one supposedly blogs anonymously.

in all reality this is not an anonymous blog, it is one maintained under pseudonym and one often categorized as fiction. after all in my reality, there is nothing but fiction.

a truly anonymous blog would have a few other technical refinements which this one user is not willing to bother with. still, it is rather odd when i do receive what can only be considered hate mail, even if it comes via yahoo IM. somebody out there really hates what i have written here and in the blogs signed "cairo otaibi." ok, i have a troll on my heels, and i was stupid enough to engage in IM conversation with the pervert.

it is easy to say that it does not matter, but it is not easy to just ignore the expression of malevolence and aggression. if i had not been watching my shadow all the while posting and writing for the past two years, i could perhaps fear that i had somehow done something horribly wrong.

what is hate? i really wonder what that emotion is that we call hate. why project one's one frustrations onto another being? recently i listened to a good friend of mine tell me the not so very pretty story of how his ex-partner is now giving expression to her own frustration and discomfort in the form of aggression, even physical aggression, towards him.

there are mutterings of the less enlightened character that often hit me at just the time when i am finally just able to deal with them. people say something or other, and then it is always a matter of choice as to whether i will take it personally or not. in fact, all utterings and mutterings are usually not personal, we like to think that we can make them personal. they are as personal as the rain, and we will get wet if we stand under the rain, still there is nothing personal about the fact that it is raining. the same goes for a lot of what is said and gets said between humans. most people, like myself, do have a certain tendency to be very preoccupied with their fascination for the own belly button. but why throw your own crap at others?

i suppose i needed a reminder to go back to the karate dojo. i have not trained much karate in the past months, and i do not want  it to be a year of staying out for whatever crappy excuse i might be able to invent. not that it would matter much, still, last month i was at a special training and i did enjoy it much. my discipline is aikido. one of the reasons is that aikido does enable me to deal with my own shortcomings and the other's aggressions. a martial art, first is art. but why is it art? i think that most people think that they are clear on the martial aspect. for me it is the inner journey, the jihad, the know thyself until you disappear. anybody who ever got anywhere in a close call knows that you are being your best when you do disappear, when the self disappears. when the self disappears your do not react, you respond. one of my sensei's said something very wise on the subject of injuries: injuries, he said, are the refection of one's frustration and aggression. bingo! it so goes for the psyche.

when you want to hurt another and throw blows at them that denigrate the other, or that you think are aimed at the other's soft spot, who do you think that you are hurting?

i have recently written about fear, and how paralyzing that fear can be. it is paralyzing, it stops me in my tracks. this fear, this fear that i have embraced recently is rather simple: it is the fear of pain. as i look back into my childhood and teenage years, this fear gets me, it paralyzes. still, it is not by negating that i can deal with it. it is also not by transforming it into aggression projected on to others, usually those who i love or love me, that i can deal with it. i can only embrace this fear, embrace this pain, they are all mine and will always be. the pain of abuse is nothing that one likes to revisit, i certainly do not. revisiting the pain of abuse is like death, but only worse. in revisiting the pain of abuse you are both dying and still alive; it is truly frightening. as some wise man once said, the best students get the toughest problems.

last night i had a long phone conversation with a good friend of mine mostly about money and family... it was a great conversation.

Technorati Tags: abuse, aikido, blogs, karate, pain, personal, writing